“The story of Coleridge’s life,” observed I. A. Richards in 1950, “has been told many times, in outline and at length—too often to an accompaniment of wrung hands, wry faces, set frowns, and worse.” Such biographical opprobrium, tedious though it may be, is unsurprising given the rich occasions for reprimand that Coleridge provided. Plagiarism, drug abuse, deadbeat fatherhood: these are among the crimes of which he may easily be convicted, and at him an army of carping Plutarchs has thrown its books. Above all, however, Coleridge has been chided for not living up to his abilities. “What a humbling lesson to all men is Samuel Coleridge,” his own brother concluded in disgust. He is a poster boy for squandered talent, a cautionary figure—in short, that awful thing, a disappointment. The pained tone taken by many of his critics is epitomized by Leslie Stephen’s lugubrious summation in a lecture of 1888: “When all is said, the history, both of the man and the thinker, will always be a sad one—the saddest in some sense that we can read, for it is the history of early promise blighted and vast powers all but running hopelessly to waste.”

A daunted reader sizing up the Bollingen edition of Coleridge—thirteen volumes thick and counting—might wonder what all the fuss is about. Yet a shapely and marmoreal oeuvre it isn’t: fragments abound; so does weak poetry; much of the prose makes Emerson seem a model of sequacious lucidity; and a general dishevelment mars the work as a whole. Also, Coleridge notoriously penned his best verse early on, achieving in his “conversation poems” a relaxed felicity, and in “Kubla Khan” and “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” an altitude of imagination, that he couldn’t sustain. Nor did his habit of projecting impossibly grand opuses—he once indulged the Borgesian fantasy of writing “300 volumes,” allowing ten years for each—help deflate expectations. As Coleridge himself admitted, “the Number of [my] unrealized schemes, and the Mass of my miscellaneous fragments, have often furnished my friends with a Subject of Raillery, and sometimes Regret and Reproof.”

The chief reason Coleridge provokes dismay is that he was, as Stephen’s “vast powers” suggests, by common consent a genius of the first magnitude; in terms of sheer I.Q., he has few literary rivals. Another point of consensus is that his brilliance flashed out most dazzlingly in his talk. His phosphorescent monologues have been variously compared to waves, rivers, auroras, even the Milky Way; an American auditor swore he’d heard nothing to match him since Niagara Falls. Like Johnson and Wilde, he is the representative windbag of his generation. Unlike those endlessly quotable worthies, however, Coleridge has been survived by few of his own remarks, which somehow frustrated would-be stenographers, refusing to harden for posterity into immortal minutes. So there sprang up a waggish tradition, from Peacock to Beerbohm, of mocking the style of his prolixity, but none of preserving its contents. No full Boswell treatment for Coleridge, then—his biographers have had to settle for indicating the fact of his cacoethes loquendi. What we get is the impression of a man who, in the excellent poolhall phrase, too rarely stopped talking and started chalking.

If even Coleridge’s prodigious gift of gab can come to seem less a glory than a symptom, what hope is there for an end to the wrung hands and set frowns, to the slide of biography toward pathography, to the sad sense of vast powers hemorrhaging? Oddly enough, it was Stephen himself who pointed a way out of this impasse when he speculated that “a Life of Coleridge may still be put together by some judicious writer … which should in turn remind us of Augustine, of Montaigne, and of Rousseau, and sometimes, too, of the inimitable Pepys.” Stephen calls, in short, for Coleridge to be placed among the great self-disclosers; and his daughter, Mrs. Woolf, seemed to pick up on her father’s hint when she wrote, “In proportion as he became incapable of action, he became capable of feeling… . To confess, to analyse, to describe was the only alleviation of his appalling torture.” The ideal biographer of Coleridge, perhaps, will present him not as a Goethe manqué but on his own peculiar terms, his life a baroque inward turbulence to marvel at rather than an outward botch to bemoan.

Richard Holmes started writing biographies at an age by which many of us scarcely have bothered to read one. His six-hundred-page, prize-winning life of Shelley came out when Holmes was all of twenty-nine, and his fascination with biography began at least a decade earlier: at nineteen he set out astride a donkey to retrace the path of R. L. Stevenson through the Cevennes. Where most biographers stray into the art, Holmes clearly was born to it.

Shelley: The Pursuit (1974) opens with a brusque, almost pugnacious caveat: “There will always be Shelley lovers, but this book is not for them. The angel they seek can be found in the golden reminiscences of Trelawny, or the charming romance by André Maurois.” The Shelley who emerges from his study bears less resemblance to Ariel, as Maurois styled him, than to Charles Manson—a vain, shrill, mutinous, often hysterical aspiring guru who drifted around Europe with his flock of young women, leaving a trail of dead babies (and a drowned ex-wife) behind him.

Holmes’s next book, Footsteps (1985), is splendidly sui generis. A blend of straight biography, rumination on the form, and autobiography, it relates how the aptly surnamed Holmes sleuthed after, in succession, Stevenson, Mary Wollstonecraft, Shelley, and Gérard de Nerval. If the book sounds self-congratulatory, it isn’t. In fact, the final section ends with Holmes’s acknowledgment that the life of Nerval he wrote was “a confused production [which] wisely no publisher ever touched.” In the Shelley essay, meanwhile, Holmes repudiates one of his own bold claims (about the parentage of a short-lived child). These admissions of bungling and fallibility, far from sapping our respect, draw us into the biographer’s laboratory. Intimate, congenial, and above all fired by a bright love for its medium, Footsteps makes biography seem less an affair of archival drudgery than one of travel, feeling, instinct, art.

In 1989 Holmes’s Coleridge: Early Visions was published. Now reissued in paper,[1] it sees Coleridge through the first half of his life, a period whose highlights include his harebrained utopian scheme called Pantisocracy, his flirtation with Jacobin journalism, his Wanderjahr in Germany, and the most fruitful period of his friendship and collaboration with Wordsworth. Here, Holmes developed the format he’s been using ever since: long, almost symphonic chapters divided into many sections, and these into short paragraphs—piddling details on the surface of it, but in fact they represent the structural aspect of Holmes’s whole approach, which is constantly to pivot and shift point of view, darting in on his quarry from a number of angles rather than belaboring a single line of inquiry.

Holmes described his next book, Dr. Johnson and Mr. Savage (1993), as an experiment in “microbiography,” since it focuses on the short, obscure relationship between the young Johnson, still a raw hack new to London, and the churlish, disreputable, ultimately homicidal Richard Savage. It is a Houdiniesque demonstration of just how much Holmes, his hands tied by the dearth of evidence, can conjure up by sheer application and perspicacity.

In my view, Holmes is quite simply the best literary biographer now active in English. Why? As I’ve already suggested, he is charmingly familiar, never censorious, and unafraid to leap and, occasionally, fall flat. Each of his books is not simply a faithful record of its subject but an exploration of biographical form itself. Holmes also seems drawn to his subjects by uncommonly powerful affinities. He is attracted to characters who are by nature restless, nomadic, in extremis, and European rather than insular in their leanings. (The relationship of English writers to the Continent is one of his significant themes). A keen sense of poignancy sharpens everything he writes. And bringing it all together is a perfectly adapted prose style, supple and clear yet capable of fine lyric bursts. Owing to these qualities, Holmes’s books have little in common with the hulking compendia of inert facts we’ve come to expect and, too often, accept. The longueurs drearily endemic to most biographies are quite absent from his.

Multi-part biographies exasperate. Left hanging, the reader is first tormented with impatient curiosity and then, by the time the next volume appears, galled to discover how much he’s forgotten of the previous. Not even so fine a writer as Richard Holmes can surmount this difficulty, but he has eased it by concluding Early Visions with Coleridge poised on the cusp of perilous adventure. The image of the poet settled at twilight aboard the Malta-bound merchant-ship Speedwell, a rudder-case serving for his desk and—the clinching detail, this—coops full of quacking ducks at his feet, stayed vividly with me for the interim between volumes.

Darker Reflections[2] picks up virtually the next moment. It is April 9, 1804, and Coleridge is under sail. The first long chapter of the book, which covers his more-than-two-year Mediterranean sojourn, plays out like a brisk historical novel. Mustering his considerable charm, Coleridge soon endears himself to, and finagles employment with, the Maltese governor, Sir Alexander Ball. During a sidetrip to Sicily, he gets embroiled in a potentially explosive diplomatic incident, but comports himself with unexpected sangfroid. For much of 1805 the doped-up poet is, of all things, the acting public secretary of Malta and the chum of naval heroes like Captain Stephen “Our Country Right or Wrong” Decatur. Nelson’s death finds him in Naples; there is a moving description here of the city’s Englishmen openly weeping and embracing in the streets. Coleridge next surfaces in Rome, where he falls in with, among others, the German writer Johann Ludwig Tieck and the American painter Washington Allston. As Napoleon’s armies sweep down through Italy, Coleridge—later boasting that the emperor had issued a personal warrant for his arrest, and that the pope had abetted his escape—slips back to England in August 1806.

Coleridge’s peregrinations continued fitfully for the next decade, but henceforth he ricocheted only within a tight triangle described by London, the West Country, and the Lake District. As his itineracy attests, these years were, by and large, desperate, punishing ones for Coleridge; that he survived them at all, unclaimed by overdose or suicide (an abdication he often pondered), is astonishing.

To begin, his wretched love life. One way to summarize Coleridge’s amorous dilemma is to say that he was Southey’s brother-in-law but wanted to be Wordsworth’s; another, that he married the wrong Sara. Before leaving for Malta, he had conceived a passion for Wordsworth’s sister-in-law, Sara Hutchinson, whose name Coleridge anagrammatized to Asra. While the infatuation seems never to have gone beyond mawkish caresses, it haunted him for the rest of his days. Worse still, his anguish over Asra was bound up with his jealousy of Wordsworth, who, not unlike a more wholesome Shelley, seemed to glide through life in a cozy penumbra of feminine solicitude. To the needy, sentimental Coleridge, nothing could have looked more paradisal. His fondest wish was to crash the Wordsworthian group hug.

The resulting erotic tension came to a head around Christmas 1806, when Coleridge saw—or, more probably, hallucinated—Asra in bed with his fellow bard. The thought of one’s sweetheart being lustily rogered by William Wordsworth cannot be pleasant, yet somehow Coleridge fought it down. A far more serious rupture occurred in 1810 when Wordsworth apparently warned off one of Coleridge’s prospective babysitters. Irate and wounded, Coleridge badmouthed Wordsworth all over London. The Cumbrian sallied forth to quash these calumnies, and there ensued a farcically stubborn showdown during which the two poets communicated only through third parties. At last a truce of sorts was hammered out, but the old camaraderie had been ruined; except for a shared return to Germany in 1828, they scarcely saw each other thereafter. What a curious pair they make: Wordsworth flinty, decisive, imperturbable, forging steadily ahead; Coleridge a creature of panics, dawdlings, and velleities, always “veering about from one hope to another,” as Lamb put it. That they fell out is less surprising than that they ever got on.

Equally un-Wordsworthian and volatile were Coleridge’s literary activities during these years. Verse in general was the wrong outlet for his discursive energies; prose proved a more elastic medium. His first major venture was The Friend, a one-man periodical cranked out over ten months in 1809–10. A mishmash of his various preoccupations, The Friend was classic Coleridgean fare. “Many issues ended with an unfinished sentence … and many footnotes (often containing poetry) threatened to engulf the main text,” comments Holmes. Financially the paper was, small surprise, a disaster; even Coleridge acknowledged “my Don Quixotism in expecting that the public will ever pretend to understand my lucubrations.” His next foray into journalism, in 1811, more remuneratively catered to the ruck: a series of ninety-one leaders written for the Courier, many of them anti-Bonapartist. “Much of it was frankly little more than wartime propaganda,” writes Holmes. “Coleridge’s resort to patriotic journalism … probably did more damage to his contemporary reputation than anything else he ever wrote.” (His erstwhile friend Hazlitt, a lifelong radical and admirer of Napoleon, blasted Coleridge for his apostasy and became thereafter his personal gadfly.) Conversely, Biographia Literaria, which he cobbled together in 1815, did much to raise his posthumous stock, especially among the New Critics.

However, it was neither as poet nor prose writer that Coleridge found his widest audience, but as playwright and lecturer. His play Osorio, rejected by Sheridan in 1797, was reborn in 1813 as Remorse and became a Drury Lane hit; together with his journalism and lectures, it boosted him briefly to the status of, in Holmes’s words, “a recognized ‘lion’ of Regency London.” As for the lectures, which touched on everyone from Shakespeare to Schlegel, the first series of them, arranged by Sir Humphry Davy, was held at the Royal Society in 1808. Many performances went swimmingly, and Coleridge did his waterfall imitation on and off for years. But there were, predictably, debacles. De Quincey reports of one early oration that, “His lips were baked with feverish heat, and often black in colour; and … he often seemed to labour under an almost paralytic inability to raise the upper jaw from the lower.”

As fellow imbiber De Quincey’s ghoulish description points up, opium threw spanners into every work. To take just one instance of the havoc it wrought on Coleridge’s career, he once promised to write for the Courier, over a single weekend, two long essays, duly touted on the front page that Friday. And next? “Coleridge took a deep breath, opened his laudanum decanter, and collapsed. None of the essays was ever delivered.” Parched lips were the least of the physical consequences. Reading Darker Reflections, you will learn more than you probably wanted to know about the gastrointestinal embarrassments visited on the average nineteenth-century junky. The enema in particular looms large. That Coleridge, with his chronic verbal dysentery, should often have become costive is an obvious but irresistible irony.

The course of Coleridge’s addiction was more serpentine, less a long unbroken fall, than Stephen’s “running hopelessly to waste” implies. “Obstinate in resurrection,” he time and again bestirred himself from the depths of narcosis to launch forth on some fresh argosy; there is a pattern of sorts to his sudden ignominious plunges and slow resurfacings. The worst overdose occurred in 1813, when he bottomed out in a Bath inn and might have died but for a magnanimous doctor, Caleb Parry, who took him under his wing, and a friend, Josiah Wade, who patiently nursed him back to health in Bristol.

In fact, this was only one of many times when Coleridge’s life was buoyed, and quite possibly saved, by the kindness of both strangers and kin. “Remarkable men find remarkable conveniences,” Henry James aphorizes in “The Coxon Fund,” his nouvelle à clef about Coleridge. Like James himself, Coleridge dictated much of his later prose, and he had a knack for recruiting unpaid amanuenses. He was lucky to find generous bankrollers in the Wedgwood family and De Quincey; in his longsuffering wife a paragon of patience; and in Southey a substitute father. Coleridge had, in Holmes’s crisp phrase, “cuckoo-like propensities,” and a sixth sense for free shelter; he was a sort of professional houseguest. The first of his adoptive families, the easygoing Morgans, sporadically coddled him in various homes from 1807 until 1816. (One is reminded here of Johnson and the Thrales.) But an ingrate sponge Coleridge wasn’t. When the Morgans ran into dire financial troubles, he rode loyally to the rescue and helped them dig out. “He took whatever came,” notes James, “but he never plotted for it, and no man who was so much of an absorbent can ever have been so little of a parasite.”

When in 1816 Coleridge came under the protection of his final and most effective savior, Dr. James Gillman, it marked not only the end of his worst opium ravages but also the beginning of his relatively halcyon last phase. Typically, Coleridge started off a patient and wound up the family pet, living with the Gillmans until his death in 1834. (Swinburne rounded out his days in a similar fashion.) About opium addiction Gillman was eminently shrewd: rather than trying to wean Coleridge outright, he let him take small doses and sneak a few drams on the side. In a quintessential Coleridgean moment, a friend once met him stealthily scoring laudanum at his chemist while Byron’s funeral cortège—the 1820s equivalent of Princess Diana’s—went by. Coleridge delivered an elaborate impromptu eulogy.

Under Gillman’s care, Coleridge mellowed into his valedictory incarnation as the Sage of Highgate: the avuncular, somewhat dotty figure who famously strolled the Heath with Keats and, in only two miles, “broached a thousand things”; the object of pilgrimages by Mill, Carlyle, and Emerson. He wrote little new yet published much old—to scant profit, alas, being far less blessed in his publishers than his doctors. Other woes included the relentless brickbats of Hazlitt—who once, having seen Coleridge’s Lay Sermon advertised, savagely reviewed it before it was even written—and the dismissal from his Oxford fellowship of his son Hartley. But for the most part Coleridge goes out in, if not quite triumph, something surprisingly like peace.

Crabb Robinson recorded in his diaries that one day Lamb

corrected me not angrily, but as if really pained by the expression “poor Coleridge” I accidentally made use of. “He is a fine fellow, in spite of all his faults and weaknesses. Call him Coleridge—I hate ‘poor Coleridge.’ I can’t bear to hear pity applied to such a one.”

Neither can Richard Holmes. More than in high regard, Holmes holds him in a kind of awe—an amazement at his omnivorous intellect and phoenix-like perseverance. Although far from blind to Coleridge’s foolishness, absurdities, and penchant for humbug—a light vein of Stracheyesque comedy burbles through the book—Holmes is deeply respectful, even affectionate, toward his addled charge.

Perhaps the most striking technical feature of this second volume is the use Holmes makes of Coleridge’s often wincingly naked notebooks, in and out of which he weaves with masterful fluidity; if all good biographies are feats of nimble synthesis, this one is exceptionally so. To say that Holmes perfectly fits Stephen’s bill for a “judicious writer” might seem procrustean, but the effect of his deft quotation —an undervalued art—and acute commentary thereon truly is to set Coleridge in, or at least adjacent to, the company of Augustine and the rest. Guided by the notebooks and his own alertness to nuances of feeling, Holmes penetrates the murky tumult of Coleridge’s inner life and minutely chronicles the war he waged there with himself. This struggle becomes, in Holmes’s account of it, the central drama of the book.

To what degree Coleridge’s addiction should be stressed is among the crucial choices any biographer of him must make, and Holmes, it seems to me, has gotten it exactly right. While never slighting the anguish of dependence, he does not treat it as a separate or adventitious phenomenon, but always as part of a whole web of disturbances. Coleridge’s textual kleptomania Holmes similarly refuses to isolate or condemn. The purloined profundities are, to Holmes, less revealing of his underhanded ways than of his loneliness, which he sought to ease by holding “endless, sometimes desperate, ‘night-conversations’ with his fellow authors.” Also in Coleridge’s partial defense, Holmes points out how widespread at the time was the habit of furtive borrowing. Victims included Coleridge himself, who saw choice bits of “Christabel” brazenly filched by Sir Walter Scott yet never complained. Finally, Holmes argues that much of what was stolen was transformed and even improved—“Coleridge plagiarized, but no one plagiarized like Coleridge.” Is Holmes too apologetic here? Those determined to take a hard line on the matter will no doubt think so, but I, for one, find his unrighteous views sensible.

Where I often part ways with Holmes is over Coleridge’s original work, which he too eagerly praises. Time and again he salutes the cerebrations as “brilliant,” the poems as “beautiful” or “haunting.” These they intermittently are, I agree, but more often other adjectives come to mind, such as “woolly,” “turgid,” and “diffuse.” “Genius tends to be careless in its strength. Genius is, by the nature of it, always in rather a hurry. Genius can’t be bothered about perfection.” Beerbohm’s grumble—made apropos of Strachey, whom he compliments for not having it—applies damningly to Coleridge and sums up my misgivings about him.

I have a second, related cavil. As in Early Visions, Holmes in his footnotes maintains a running commentary on, among other things, Coleridge’s posthumous influence. Often these excurses are persuasive and enlightening, but sometimes Holmes falls prey to overzealous post hoc ergo propter hoc reasoning. For example, Coleridge’s dictum that “Every man is born an Aristotelian, or a Platonist” Holmes hails as “a seminal con- cept” and an example of Coleridge’s “bequest of ideas to posterity.” The evidence? To Holmes, it seems, any latter-day pundit who proposes to split the world between one type of cove and another necessarily follows in the great man’s wake. Yet surely Coleridge wasn’t the first thus to halve mankind; surely such broad dichotomies are too general for any one person to claim. A touch of Coleridgean overkill here.

The above trifling blemishes aside, Darker Reflections brings to completion one of the superior biographies of our age. These two volumes are, if nothing else, unsurpassed in their concinnity: Holmes knows just what to put where and just how far he can digress without losing the main thread. That such structural punctiliousness has been lavished on one of our messiest, most discombobulated men of letters—“He was like a jelly minus its mould, he had to be embanked” (James yet again)—goes to the root of biographical irony and paradox. For he who writes another’s life imposes on it an order, and perhaps even a meaning, that its liver never knew.

Life rarely acted on Coleridge in a way that was, to use his own neologism, “esemplastic,” which is to say unifying. He famously claimed that “Kubla Khan” had been interrupted by “a person from Porlock.” Another poem, “The Lime Tree Bower My Prison,” finds him unable to hike with his friends because of having “met with an accident.” Even his best-known phrase, “the willing suspension of disbelief,” smacks of abrupt severance. He represents, in part, the poet as lame duck. There’s something terminally naïve about him, something almost of the idiot savant.

But was Coleridge in any significant sense a “failure”? While the enduring prestige accorded his finest work seems to refute the notion, there clings to him, like stale hookah-smoke, a Delmore Schwartzian whiff of thwarted potential and defeat. Doubtless a clean-living Coleridge would have accomplished more than he did, but I wonder how much. He was dreamy, restless, dithering, erratic, and centrifugal long before laudanum made him more so. Coleridge reports of the waylaid Wedding-Guest that “The Mariner hath his will,” and many concluded that his own had been hijacked, perhaps prenatally. “His cardinal sin is that he wants will. He has no resolution.” Thus Carlyle. “His mouth was gross, voluptuous, open, eloquent; his chin good-humoured and round; but his nose, the rudder of the face, the index of the will, was small, feeble, nothing—like what he has done.” So, with his usual graciousness, physiognomized Hazlitt.

To me all this weighs in Coleridge’s favor. For a congenitally high-strung, weak-willed fantasist, he did rather well for himself. The tendency to see him as an illustration of Cyril Connolly’s maxim “Whom the gods wish to destroy, they first call promising,” to peg him as a tragic archetype, is off the mark. Pace Stephen, who as editor of the DNB was in a good position to judge, I disagree that Coleridge’s is the saddest history; I can think of dozens of writers whose lives I’d rather not lead, and as many whose stories are far more wrenching to read. Factored into Stephen’s gloomy calculus, I suspect, is the Victorian horror of wasted steampower. If Coleridge fribbled away much of his copious vapor on talk and Teutonic chimeras, well, what of it? Such was his dispersive temperament. Better to have a gross, voluptuous mouth and feeble nose than a pinched frown and hands grown chafed from wringing.

Notes
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1. Coleridge: Early Visions, 1772–1804, by Richard Holmes; Pantheon Books, 432 pages, $17 paper. Go back to the text.
2. Coleridge: Darker Reflections, 1804–1834, by Richard Holmes; Pantheon Books, 640 pages, $30. Go back to the text.